Democrats lay awake at night thinking about one economic number ahead of this fall’s midterm elections: the unemployment rate. But that number, mired at nearly 10 percent, is unlikely to improve enough to boost their prospects at the polls.

“The difficulty with those big numbers is they are all after the fact. They tell us what already happened,” said Karl Rove, former top political adviser to President George W. Bush who has documented the minimal connection between GDP, unemployment and midterm election results. “The American people tend to react to information they glean from their daily experience.”

So instead of focusing on headline numbers, officials in the administration and on Capitol Hill, along with many economists, are tracking a handful of additional economic gauges, from lumber prices to Google search terms to consumer sentiment. And the trend in the following figures will tell the tale of both the economy and Democrats’ chances for political survival this fall.

Google searches

Administration officials keep their eyes on all sorts of so-called high-frequency data, from electric utility company outputs to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s Business Outlook Survey. But one of the more interesting data points is the number of people searching the Web for “new car dealers,” according to data compiled by Google Insights for Search.

According to Treasury Department officials, Google searches for “car dealer” trended down as the recession began, then spiked as the economy began to recover fairly strongly late last year.

The searches then plunged as the recovery slowed and are now lacking a strong trend in either direction, sort of like the economy as a whole.

The Google searches tend to closely track auto sales numbers reported by manufacturers and released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But they are reported weekly in real time, before auto sales are completed and reported by the government.

So the Google data can be a fairly effective early indicator of where the economy is headed.

Alan Krueger, assistant treasury secretary for economic policy, told POLITICO the department also closely follows, among other statistics, lumber production as a leading indicator of home building and electricity output because it is also a leading indicator of industrial activity.

“We look at indicators like these because they give us some purchase on what is going to happen in the jobs report and with GDP growth,” Krueger said.

Weekly jobless claims

The economy is not growing fast enough to create enough jobs to bring down the 9.5 percent unemployment rate. In fact, gross domestic product is expanding just barely fast enough to keep the jobless rate from rising further.

So any employment trends, good or bad, will show up first in the initial jobless claims reported every Thursday morning by the Labor Department.

New unemployment claims began dropping last fall when the recovery began but started moving sideways at nearly half-a-million early this year. On Thursday, the four-week moving average — the most useful measure — came in at 452,500, the lowest figure since May but still fairly high.

If the economy reaches a tipping point, it will show up in these numbers first, economists say.

“Weekly unemployment claim numbers have always been one of the best leading indicators for the overall economy,” said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management. “They will give us the earliest indicator that we are coming out of the soft patch. If they drop below 400,000, then we are coming out of it. And that will wag the tail of the stock market; when it happens, stocks could move up fast.”

Consumer confidence

When it comes to economic recoveries, attitude matters.

People need to feel their jobs are at least fairly secure and that their wages will be going up in order for them to start spending. And consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.

“Consumer confidence can be self-fulfilling. If people are feeling bad, then they pull back and then lose even more confidence and faith,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “And if they feel good, then things keep getting better.”

One closely watched study is the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey, which showed that consumer sentiment dropped sharply in July from 76 to 67.8. The trend is moving the wrong way, but it is still 2.7 percentage points higher than it was in July 2009.

Partisan bickering and legislative gridlock in Washington has a direct impact on this figure, according to economists. Whether it’s uncertainty over where tax rates will be next year or a general feeling that Washington can’t agree on any kind of jobs-related legislation, government inefficiency depresses consumer confidence, which in turn holds back the economy.

The Conference Board, which tracks consumer confidence, also reported a drop in its index for July to 50.4 points on its 100-point scale, down from 54.3 points in June. Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center, said the number would not start advancing again until job growth picks up.

“What’s having the great impact on confidence is the labor market,” Franco said. “We began to see positive signs in the labor market in the spring, and we saw some improvement in confidence as a result. And then when the pace of job growth decelerated, we also saw the same impact in confidence levels. And that won’t change until we create jobs at a pace greater than 40,000 or 50,000 a month.”

Of course, even when confidence comes back, lingering debt hangovers from the credit-bubble years will most likely limit both spending and the pace of the recovery.

But Krueger and other administration officials took some solace in the fact that last week’s GDP report showed that the consumer savings rate rose more than expected to 6.2 percent, indicating that households might be getting back in financial shape faster than expected.

All the better to get them spending again.

Stock prices

This one may seem counterintuitive, given the conventional wisdom that share prices have come unhitched from the U.S. economy.

The conventional wisdom is true, to an extent, as stocks have been going up, in part, because companies slashed costs to boost profitability. In addition, some of the best-performing stocks are those that draw much of their profits from faster-growing economies outside the U.S.

Nonetheless, a rising stock market, no matter what is driving it, tends to boost both consumer confidence and the mystical “animal spirits” among chief executive confidence.

“Stock prices are important; they are a good barometer,” said Zandi. “To a degree, they both reflect conditions and influence conditions. If executives see their stock prices rising, they will be more emboldened, more inclined to hire. If prices start to head south, it’s the other way around.”

As the economy recovered from the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, the market recovered along with it. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose as high as 1,217 in April but has dropped by nearly 10 percent since then.

The past few weeks have been a whipsaw, with the market just as schizophrenic as the economy at large.